Posts

One very positive development, following the publication of Sam Harris’ The End of Faith, is that commentators on the issue are occasionally taking pains to identify themselves what one might call “moderate athiests”. See, for example, this review by David Niose of Humanist magazine. Continue reading “The End of Faith”

A friend remarked over dinner that, if we were in London (his home town), power outages such as those experienced in Cape Town of late would result in marches and the like. This may be true, and I can’t help wondering if my feeling that there would simply be no point in marching is a) true or b) an indication that he’s highlighting a deep-seated apathy that Capetonians (maybe South Africans) are prone to. Continue reading “Apathy”

“I WAS UNABLE TO ACCESS ANY OF MY E-MAILS. BUT MY MARK RECORDS ARE INCORRECT BECAUSE I HAV HANDED IN MY BIG ESSAY 2.THE TUTOR(xxxxx xxxxx) SAID THAT SHE HAS HANDED ALL RESULTS IN BUT THEY DO NOT REFLECT ON THE BOARD. PLEASE WOULD YOU CORRECT THE ERROR.”Continue reading “Examples: emails from students”

The New York Times carried this article discussing student emails to their professors, which has been generating subtantial debate on academia-themed blogs (for example, here, and here). All the posts so far are from campuses in the US and Canada, where I’d imagine it rare to teach around 2000 students per year, as I do. Continue reading “Emails from students”

Say what you will about wine, beer or any cocktail; there are times when whisky – and only whisky – is right. For starters, whisky has always been good for conversation. Mignon McLaughlin (in The Neurotic’s Notebook, 1960) said “we come late, if at all, to wine and philosophy: whiskey and action are easier”, but he was wrong. Continue reading “Whisky as ritual”

Whether students like it or not, one of the things I aim for in my classrooms is to break down the (usually artificial) divide between academia and everyday life. It’s made somewhat easier by the fact that the sort of things I teach are easily applicable to non-academic activities. Continue reading “Classroom politics”

If you’re a South African who is eligible to vote (and have an ID book, unlike one Resistentialist I know), then you may be interested in this analysis of how much your vote could matter. The Cape Town race is one that’s too close to call, as is often the case. Continue reading “Local elections”

Having spent the past few hours re-reading all the correspondence generated by Watson’s article, and the article itself, I still found myself mostly underwhelmed and unconvinced by Watson’s bile (except for the Hughes connections, which Krog hasn’t explained satisfactorily). Cogent argumentation, rather than rhetoric, should win arguments. So let’s look at the argument…

Subscribers to PoetryWeb have been debating the Krog/Watson thing too, in case you want more. I’ve had great difficulty following the debate, not only due to an irregular power supply to the campus, but also because power has, of late, not necessarily meant it’s been worth turning your PC on. To try and preserve our server disks and other hardware in the face of unannounced power outages, the IT folks have sensibly decided to shut the network down till Monday. The fact that this decision is sensible should not be interpreted to mean that I’m not irritated by it…

My previous post on Stephen Watson’s allegations of plagiarism, levelled at Antjie Krog, comes down on Watson’s side. Subsequent to that post, Krog, her publishers, and Eve Gray have responded to the allegations. Having read these responses – particularly those of Krog and Gray – it becomes clear that I posted in haste, largely driven by a historical respect for Watson, a dislike for Krog’s Country of My Skull, and my own daily battles against plagiarists in my classrooms.

I no longer believe there to be any merit to Watson’s charges, and am now far more interested in the question of why he felt it necessary to be so hostile and disingenuous in his treatment of what appears to be a non-issue. Could it be as simple a thing as jealousy, given his relative obscurity of late?